Wilderness

So the past few days have been a bit crazy, but in a cool way. Unfortunately I haven't been posting a lot and I apologize, but yeah. Jenn's been here and we've been doing a lot of exploring and some working, too. Thanks to her I now have a good 111 cages for my main experiment which was a good amount of the prerequisite labor time.

Also Sunday one of our fellow labgroups was gill-netting and caught a shark. 3 sharks, actually. Small guys.

That said, it's been a fun time. It rained all day Monday and Tuesday so we didn't get out until late on Tuesday, but when we did finally make our way down to Nanny Goat, it was a blast. By which I mean the wind was literally threatening to blast us off the beach. Strongest wind I think I've ever been in, hands down. Tropical storm weather is intense. That evening too we went for a drive in one of the mules. Tons of white tailed deer everywhere, including a buck that ran a few hundred yards out alongside our mule. Jenn was quite pleased.

Yesterday we finished making some cages and also did the Nanny Goat Trail. Lots of coolness to be seen, including lots of butterflies, a black racer, and a bunch of other neatness. When we finally got down to the beach some of the stuff we found washed up from the storm was pretty startling: a mangrove seed, and a coconut, in particular. On closer inspection, the coconut had some gooseneck barnacles stamped onto it.

Later on we did a bit more exploring, including wandering out to a tree overlooking the marsh that was full of wood storks. They're relatively uncommon and very cool birds, but they sound so ugly. Like a squonk sort of noise. They're nesting in that tree though - babies and all. Didn't see any directly, but the birds themselves are definitely feeding the young in traditional bird fashion (i.e puking). So majestic.

We also wandered out to a little island in one of the ponds linked to the mainland by a system of bridges. On the way out we spotted a family of deer: a doe, buck, and 3 fawns. Deer make me spooky (bucks can be very aggressive) so we stayed our distance, but it was a cool experience. Lots of neatness. There's a little terrace at the end for hanging plants that's seen better years, but still sort of captures the ruined, age-old feel of the island in general. I love that stuff.

As for today, Jenn and I went data collecting on the second mini project. It was fun, and much, much quicker than I would have been alone. We make a lean, mean, science-doing machine. I also showed off my crab wrangling skills to her (as well as all of the common marsh crab species), and as an added bonus, the snails at this site are delightfully well behaved so preliminary data looks good.

My plots. Aren't they pretty?

I'll be headed to Jacksonville with her tomorrow for a cook-out with her family, but I'll try to be better about posting this weekend and in the following weeks. We should be working on getting my main project up and running soon. Also as soon as I get a chance, all of the stuff I mentioned here and more will be posted on my Flickr.

Mini Project Mk2 Complete!

So I worked my butt off, through high tide, through two storms (no thunder or lightning, no worries) and most of the day, but the second mini project is ready and running. I was going to take pictures, but I'm a slacker. And other than that nothing really cool happened today, so this post goes out to weird things I've noticed!

Firstly, crab legs are sharp. I wrangled like 8+ crabs today and I had a whiteclaw, missing one of his claws, cut the heck out of my hand with his legs. Not the claw, his legs. Weird! Also painful!

Secondly, white claws are distinctly harder for me to find than black claws. I found all 4 of my black claws for this setup before I found a single white of the right size. Is annoying. Black claws are so easy in comparison - all you really need to do is find a mussel mound or a burrow with a mussel shell across the top. The crabs actually like the shell - it's a nice buffer against the heat of the sun. They're smart enough to find and actively maintain the position of the shell while they hold that burrow. Seems to be something that only the blackclaws really do though.

Lastly for this post is a cool little mini-rant about cross-ecosystem ecology. This is a mouthful way of saying that you have critters moving from one system to another and doing stuff in the other system. An example - the marsh is full of good examples - raccoons. They will enter the marsh from the forest (one ecosystem to another) to forage during the night on food in the marsh, thus bringing about an effect.

The examples in the marsh specifically are endless. From the sea, you get things like fish, blue crabs, and other large predators coming in during the high tide to feed. From land, you get raccoons, fire ants, grasshoppers, etc. coming in to feed, and then weirder things. Feral pigs often come in to wallow and to some small extent feed. Their feet are essentially like spears, though, cutting up the grass and the roots beneath as they move. And wallowing too wrecks the marsh. One of our grad students is currently looking into how strong of an effect these guys have. We also have feral cows and of course deer, all coming into the marsh by low tide for various reasons.

The possibilities are mind-boggling and the effects hard to study. Which is really unfortunate, because cross-ecosystem stuff is really cool. You have all of the above going on in addition to the infaunal (resident) stuff like the crabs I study and so forth. Ecology is delightfully complicated.

The Mini Project Mk2

So today and yesterday was all working on last minute stuff for the first mini-project, and today I broke it down to start it up again somewhere else.

I think I'd mentioned that we were having some issues with the snails - if not, for some reason, the site we'd picked had snails that really, really liked to climb even in the absence of crabs. This means our control (no crab) plots had really high height values despite the lack of crab. Kind of a bad basis for comparison. They climb for other reasons too - heat the most common thing. The water that pools in the marsh's floor tends to superheat in the sun which isn't nice if you're a snail.

So we're moving it to greener, less climby pastures; ramping down the scale to 40 centimeters (a bit beyond the range we'd detected in the first trial); and placing our distance markers down closer together to really get a finer picture of the process. Also, we're gonna take radulation data - a fancy term for a measure of how much grass the snails are eating (with their radula, a sort of scrapy tongue thing they have) - in order to look at that. So it'll be running for the rest of the summer (snails eat slooooowly) to that end.

It still needs bamboo, crabs, and baseline data on the radulations, so that's my job for tomorrow. Then Monday I'm going off island for a food run and coming back with a Jenn in tow! This'll be a fun next few days. I'll be showing her the island and we may start working on getting my main project - which will focus on the dispersion of the crabs, i.e how they're spread out in a plot - rolling. I'll let y'all know how it goes and give a better breakdown of the main project soon.

The Mini Project

I'm sure some of you have been wondering just why the heck it is I've been in the marsh the past few days for like, 3-6 hour streaks collecting "data", a very vague term. So, today is the day that I talk some about what I've been doing. Warning: very few pictures and lots of science. I'll try to make it easy to read.

So, a little background info. The marshes are a very human influenced region. We've done a lot of things to them - built dikes in them, built over them, used them for agriculture, etc. We've also done some things indirectly. Blue crabs, while tasty, have taken a hit due to our fishing of them. This poses a problem - if there aren't many blue crabs, what's eating what they eat? And if nothing's eating what they eat, how does that effect the next level down?

In short, the problem (one of them) is this: snails, a prey item of blue crabs, are on the rise. They're bad news for the marsh grasses, particularly Spartina, which constitutes most of the marsh, because when they feed on the grass, they essentially make a big open wound on the plant. They then proceed to poop in the open wound, which causes fungus to grow. Fungus is one of their very favorite foods, so the cycle goes on. This alone doesn't kill the plants very quickly, but when you have a dry season, this stresses the plants out and you end up with a big, bare patch of marsh devoid of plants. These are called die-offs.

So much of our research in the Silliman lab focuses on different aspects of this problem. Mine specifically is looking at how another pair of predators of the snails, the white and black clawed mud crabs, helps control snail numbers.

Remember the cages I made early on? These puppies?

 

These have been the focus of my trial run. Essentially, I have 12 of these (4 with black claws, 4 with white claws, and 4 with nothing in them as control treatments, essentially just there for baseline info to compare the crabs to).

Now you may be wondering, why put the crab in the cage? Won't the snails not get eaten then? Which is actually precisely the point.

You see, when a mud crab is around a snail, the snail can detect it via chemical cues in the water. Snails are especially sensitive to these chemicals and have been shown to react to a lot of different predatory species. Detection of a crab makes them climb the nearest plant shoot to get away, a fear effect commonly called a "non-consumptive effect," or NCE, i.e the snail reacts to the predator but not in a way in which it gets eaten. This is not to say the snails don't get eaten -- they do, but this is another aspect of the puzzle and kind of a cool one in my book.

This, ironically enough, is actually a big problem. Spooked snails stay up on the grass and graze the ever-loving life out of it. This is called a "trait mediated indirect interaction", or TMII. By suppressing the snails, the crab indirectly causes the grass to feel an effect, in this case a negative one.

The specific interaction my research aims to address is spatial scale. So, for instance, do the snails react way far away from the crab, or is it relatively isolated? This trial run has been precisely about that, and any differences in the reaction you see when you expose the snails to either species. 

Initial data is looking kind of neat. We're looking specifically at how high the snails climb in response and how many do it versus staying on the ground, where they tend to eat lots of bacteria and stuff from the mud. The interesting thing is it only seems to spread out over essentially a third of a meter (close to a foot or so). So while the snails' climbing has a negative effect, it may only have it on a fairly small scale.

My future and main project will likely look at how the size of the crabs or how many you have and where you have them effects the process. I.e, if you have a lot in the same spot, or a lot of really big crabs, do you see a proportional change in the stuff outlined above? 

It'll be fun, but that's for another day. Ecology is delightfully complicated, no?

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Love is in the Mucky, Mosquito-Infested Air

So no real news today, but some funny shenanigans.

Firstly, Batwillet has a friend! Possibly a lady-friend! This did not mellow him out one bit today, though. In fact because he had a friend I had 2 squawky neighbors. This displeases me. 6 hours of squawk-ridden data collection is not my friend.

Secondly, as the title suggests, I stumbled upon more marsh couples. 2 more, in fact. Both mating mud crabs. Which is the most awkward and hilarious thing I've seen in a while. Unfortunately I brought my camera but not my cable, so I do have pictures but they'll have to wait.

Piiictures! See the crab on top?

For those unfamiliar with crab anatomy, their reproductive bits are underneath them, on their bellies. Males have a plate that kinda looks like the eiffel tower, whereas females have a broader plate where the eggs sit once they've been deposited. Crab eggs kinda look like a sponge. It's weird.

Suffice to say, to get crab sex, imagine 2 crabs, then flip one upside down, and smack their bellies together. It's kinda like a freaky Transformer but really they're just making babies. Oh yeah also there were mating blue crabs yesterday! They don't do it that way though.

Sorry if this post was a bit too raunchy. Isn't nature beautiful?

Mysteries in the Marsh

So I apologize for the lack of posts/general brevity on my part. Days have been long and busy, and data collection is possibly the most tedious part of good science. I spent 6 hours doing it yesterday, 2 today, and tomorrow will be another long day of it. So with that aside, I do have cool things to share.

Firstly, Sapelo is full of prickly pears. What's cool, though, is they have a pest that's pretty much killing off a lot of them. I haven't ID'd it yet but it's a voracious eater, and also kind of pretty.

 

Secondly, I think I mentioned pretty early on how Sapelo is a study in deep south urban decay. It doesn't disappoint. We went on a walk the other day and I took some shots, and in the process found a raccoon skull and something's pelvis. Oh, wilderness. You so fun.

The Greenhouse. Still haven't gone in or very close.

Houses and wreckage. Fun.

And a stately, if run-down looking house. I think it's one of the so-called Sears Houses.

 As I mentioned earlier though, been in the field quite a lot doing data collection. This can be quite mind numbing. In my case, it's lots of counting snails and measuring their heights over and over and over across 12 different experimental plots, each with 4 rows of 16 stakes each. Lots. Of data. It helps to find things to keep you sane. Especially when you have a willet (a type of marsh/shorebird) screaming incessantly at you.

Like this but noisier.

For days on end this little guy (and I'm seriously thinking it's the same one) has squawked and squalled and done flybys at me. It's seriously like the scene from The Dark Knight where Batman's just about to run down the Joker on his motorcycle, Joker's all braced and ready for it (and in fact cheering him on to do it, because if he did kill the Joker it'd be against everything that is Batman), but then Batman swerves off at the last second because he just can't kill people. It's against his moral code and whatnot.

Yeah this guy is exactly like that. He comes within punching distance but never close enough to hit. I have tentatively started referring to him as Batwillet. Sometimes I encourage him, like the Joker did. Seriously if you've forgotten that scene go rewatch the movie. Such a good one.

I have against my better judgement though started bringing my iPod into the marsh as an escape, but today I had a different escape.

The marsh itself.

The lighthouse from a different angle. Namely, across a creek from the other end of the marsh.

I wandered long and far today, for about an hour after I got done collecting data. My goal? The edge of the marsh, nestled in the high Spartina, literally chest high in plant matter.

Which I found. Also there is a sunken structure that I realize is probably invisible in this shot because I'm a wuss and won't take my good camera  (with the long zoom) into the marsh.

 The journey there was perilously muddy, but fun. Aside from the structure above, I also saw a pod of dolphins (no good pictures, sigh) frolicking and whatever it is dolphins do not far from shore. Very cool stuff.

Additional goodies about this trek? The edge of marsh tends to be oyster beds. And oyster beds are a hotbed (no pun intended) for some very cool crabs.

Despite the similarities, I'm fairly sure this guy is neither white or black claw, instead a cousin. Perhaps Dyspanopeus or Eurypanopeus. Pretty neat though.

Petrolisthes armatus, the green porcelain crab. These guys are absolutely spastic in the way they move and will do anything to get away from you.

The same guy, looking like he's about to lead an invisible lady-crab in a dance or something.

I also spooked some mating blue crabs (Callinectes sapidus) which was good for a giggle. They didn't stop. Shameless. 

Also, back on the abandoned theme from earlier, I found another odd structure, half eaten by oysters and marsh, on this trek.

Whatever it is, it's wrecked. Maybe a boat or small railroad car. It had what looked like railroad-esque wheels.

 And a boardwalk to nowhere. Once upon a time it may have crossed the creek in the above shot, but it's long since been out of order.

The vast field of brown on the left is wrack, the term for dead Spartina which floats around until it catches and settles on something, in this case, the bridge.

Honestly, after so much data collection, this was the refresher I needed. A nice reminder of why I enjoy ecology and exploration.

Bad Data Blues

So data is in, and it's weeeeird. Bad weird. May need to retake it or rethink the design somewhat. We'll see! I'll be talking to my adviser about it later.

Otherwise, news is pretty sparse. Just been building more cages and watching movies. Chill, but pretty boring stuff.

Eye Candy

I didn't do much today beyond make lots and lots of cages, so here is some eye candy from a quick hike down the Nanny Goat Trail.

Not from Nanny Goat, but still cool. Very bug-eyed.

These little six-lined racerunners (Cnemidophorus sexlineatus) are everywhere but difficult to corner for a good shot. This isn't even the prettiest of the ones I've seen, but it's the only one who sat still for long enough.

 

Cooler posts to follow tomorrow when I've taken data from the trial run and had time to process it!

A Moment of Relaxation

Many apologies for the terse posts lately, it's been a very busy week and it's not likely to get better for a week or two. In a big rush to get all of my project setup, and the trial run is finally done today. FINALLY.

To put this into perspective for y'all, I spent the past 3 days cutting down the better part of a bamboo grove for materials (it's invasive anyway, haha), trimming the bamboo to size, placing cages, placing bamboo around them in precise increments, catching crabs, catching snails, putting them in the cages, zip tying it all together, and sweating my face off. Most of this I did alone or with one helping hand. I seriously cannot help that helping hand, who shall go unnamed, quite enough.

The bamboo grove was especially murderous, though. I have more mosquito bites on my body than I have ever had in my life. There were literal clouds of mosquitoes there, like the kind you see in children's cartoons. Makes me itchy just thinking about it.

But it's worth it! Because the trial run (Yes, the trial, not the main experiment. That's later. And harder work.) is finally ready and running. My fingers are crossed for good data or all this will be for naught. I will know more on Saturday. Also I promise I'll give a better write up of the main experiment when it's up, but in the meantime I am not risking jinxing this. Not for y'all anyway!

On a sidenote, two cool happenings. The first one merits a story.

So I'd been working hard this morning setting up cages and finally had gotten to the stage where I could start gathering crabs to put into them. I'd wandered into the grass, taking a PVC pole with me. Normally you use PVC to jam into the ground next to a burrow. The sudden pressure pushes water out of the ground (and the hole) which usually shoves the crab out with it. But this time, as I'm wandering, I find a ball of grass. A literal ball, folded delicately and woven. I give it a cursory poke, and out comes flying this small, roughly softball sized blur of orange-brown fur tearing across the marsh. It's squeaking in alarm. I give chase but quickly lose it in the thick marsh grass.

I'd startled a rather elusive marsh mouse.

Like this, only probably not the right species. This is a deer mouse, genus Peromyscus.

These guys are relatively rare. Nests are uncommon, and by the time one is found, the mouse is usually long gone. But I found one. It was so, so cool. I seriously regret not having any pictures of it or even a good species ID. But still!

Secondly, though, my lovely girlfriend Jenn is getting her SCUBA certification this weekend. I'm very proud of her, and also a bit jealous because I haven't been diving in a month and a half now. So wish her luck!

Me, though? I'm going to relax and let my mini-experiment run for a couple days and in the meantime make lots of cages and watch movies and stuff. Whee.

Progress! Sorta.

So today was mostly picking a site for my final project and setting up the mini-survey mentioned in the previous post. It went well, except that I got rained out again and we ran out of materials halfway through, so it'll get finished tomorrow. Hopefully. The going is kind of slow and intense at the moment, so it's gonna be a crazy hectic week or two getting everything running.

On a lighter note, I do have some cool pictures to show off.

A better picture of a white-claw. Only his claws have some blue, too!

Them claws.

This is classic white-claw behavior. They can be very aggressive when cornered and tend to spread their claws wide and stare you down. Black-claws are a bit more kind.

This is not the first nor the last fiddler I've found carrying around a fallen comrade or some other oddity. For those of you who are sappy, he's not mourning - he's going to eat it.

Tonight's the Silliman Lab get-together/seafood fest, so should be fun. And most importantly delicious. I miss real food. See y'all tomorrow.

A Quick Update

So things are really rolling on my experiment! Expect me to be quite busy quite soon. We're doing a quick trial run on the cages to look at some basic data to direct the main experiment, which meant making lots of those cages today. Like 12. And then the plan was to set them up in the marsh.

Only it poured down rain on us 3 cages in. Oof. We'll try to rework it tomorrow, but tomorrow is also the seafood festival/Silliman Lab get together, soooo. Dunno how much will get done. Hopefully it'll work out though and I'll have the main experiment ready to go by the weekend!

Return

Back on the island. It's quite rainy and gross. On the upside I am refreshed and recharged and ready to get back to work!

On a quick side-note, I practically ran over a turtle on my way down here, by the docks! I hopped out and helped him across the road though. We're pretty sure he's a diamondback terrapin. Cool little guy, and a nice way to resume my internship.

I'm making a note here: Huge success!

The crab cages worked! Was busy yesterday (we went out to dinner as a lab group at a pizza joint in Brunswick) and didn't get to check in til today but all 3 crabs are confined and alive and kicking.

Will check back in on them again on Monday, in the meantime I'm headed back to Tallahassee for a weekend of fun and relaxation off island. See y'all then!

Hail; also Cage + Crab = ???

I apologize for the lack of post yesterday, couldn't make it down to the Institute to make a proper post. I do, however, have some cool stuff to share.

So yesterday's main job apart from a bit of reading for my project was to take salinity well data for a few marsh sites. This is more along the lines of the rain-outs I mentioned early on - research looking into whether the mussel mounds actually have any effect on the salinity of the water around them, and if that helps the grasses out during drought years.

The wells themselves are small PVC pipes perforated to allow water in, and then capped to keep the tides out. In order to take a reading, you use a pump and a fancy piece of equipment called a refractometer to measure the salt concentration. So we did this for a bunch of sites in Lighthouse, looking at different salinities at different areas. Haven't had a chance to look at the data so don't ask me specifics on any findings.

About halfway through this process, though, the weather took a turn for the worse. Initially we soldiered on and only got rained on a bit, managing to blast through all of Lighthouse, but as we made it into Oakdale, the lightning was coming on hard and fast enough to spook us back. We get into the mule (it's basically a rugged golf cart and our transportation mainstay), and one of the grad students has texted us essentially telling us to get the heck back home. So we do. Just in time to miss penny-sized hail. Craziness!

The sad part is that the storm was bad enough to wreck our rain-outs. Those're getting fixed to some extent, but we're trying a mesocosm (bucket) experiment to do the same sort of thing off the field. Today we gathered mussels to that goal. Doing so basically involved shoveling a chunk out of the marsh with a mussel mound in it and lugging it off the marsh. Fun stuff.

But the exciting part.

And oh is it exciting.

My main project for today was prototyping crab cages for my experiment. I'll detail my stuff in a later post - not sure how secretive I need to be, not to mention it's still in the works. The design is pretty brilliant - kind of like a crazy, hardware cloth (mesh) tube just big enough to get shoved into the marsh with a single crab and some snails for it to munch on and enough space to burrow.

Much too big!

Looking better..

One in the ground, with crabby inside.

And a different one, with dead oyster shell piled up around it to keep him nice and cooled off through the blistering heat of low tide.

This is more of the crazy, cool, DIY side of doing ecology. I designed them myself with a little guidance, and then I  ended up making like, 6 or 7 of these guys from scratch and scrap material today. It was kind of a Goldilocks experience. The first one (first picture above) was far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far too big (my adviser's words, not mine). The next few (I thought) would be too small, but they're the ones we ended up deploying. They may be just right.

But, my job tomorrow is to check in and make sure nobody's dead, that they can feed in there on the snails we gave them, etc. Oh, and that nobody escaped. Because despite the fact that I used like, 30 cable ties to hold the mesh together, these are essentially Houdini's crustacean counterparts. But with any luck this'll work and I'll be on my way to an excellent research project.

Another Quick Post

Yeah once again not much going on today. We finished cleaning up the project mentioned last post, took salinity data for the drought project, and put the rain-outs on just in time for it to pour down rain. I also sat down and started working out the setup for my project. A few kinks to work out in the plan, but I'll be talking to my adviser soon to get stuff figured out and hopefully have a finalized proposal ready by the weekend so we can get to work on it.

2 random thoughts. Firstly, I bloody hate ticks. There are a lot of insects out here, and I've already pulled 5 off myself total. Luckily only 2 had bitten. Fingers crossed, they hadn't been there long. Reaaaally don't want to deal with any nastiness that those guys carry.

Secondly, remember how I mentioned the fiddlers? I had the craziest thought today. I was walking through the marsh to one of our sites, and as anyone cuts through the marsh it's essentially like parting the Red Sea, except with fiddlers. They're very visual little guys, so any big, moving target sends them scuttling away quickly. But today was different. Because sitting in my path was this tiny, bold little crab,  claw raised defiantly, like so:

Coincidentally, not this guy specifically. This is actually a sand fiddler (Uca pugilator), spotted on a hike at Honeymoon Island, near Palm Harbor. The guy in my anecdote is a mud fiddler (Uca pugnax)

And the image that immediately popped into my head? A classical, iron-clad knight of old, shield raised and ready to go up against a massive, fire-breathing dragon. And I kinda had to laugh a bit.

Aluminum Flashing is the Worst Material In the World

Seriously. Today was probably the most work intensive day I've had on the island, so this post is going to be a short one. All we really did today was break down an old experiment featuring lots and lots of pens. Each pen was set up as a square, with aluminum flashing as the sides and a 2x4 at each corner. Breaking it down required pulling it out of a foot of marsh mud by the 2x4. Basically had to wiggle each corner loose.

It didn't come out super cleanly, though, and the flashing is super sharp, so myself and my 3 undergrad comrades (one of whom sadly had to leave today, but she's getting to go down to another UF research site) are basically coated in tiny, super fine but shallow micro-cuts from handling the stuff.

And then it was all marched across the marsh for about 1/4 of a mile to the truck. For 60+ cages. In the heat, and the movement hindering muck.

Oof. I am sore in many, many places, and quite tired, but it's a good tired. At least we got it (mostly) done. Still more to do tomorrow though. And I need to think more on my own project, which I'm supposed to have mostly figured out by the end of the week. Very busy, but it's still been a great summer so far. Just need to figure out how to get myself to Jenn for a bit, or vice versa. I misses her.

Sidenote, they may be obnoxiously common,

Each of those specks is a crab.

but I still absolutely adore the fiddler crabs around here.

Lazy Saturday

So today was a very mellow day. Not much got done. We took salinity data and messed with the rain-outs (from day 1) a bit to make sure all was well. The grad students were all gone off island, so it was kind of a lazy day.

There was some minor cleanup, and some wandering about and hanging out and data collecting, but the highlight of the day was a minor hike through a trail that ends with Nanny Goat Beach. You end up getting taken through like, four or five different types of ecosystems. You start out in like, a wetland forest area, moving onto a path through the salt marsh, into the traditional scrub forests I'm used to from Florida, to dunes, and finally onto the beach.

Lots of coolness. There were a handful of Armases, close cousins of the previously mentioned Sesarma, which were promptly wrangled.

 

And then released, gently.

 

 Lots of bugs. Only the pretty kind get pictures in my blog though. Seriously though the mosquitos were swarming.

 

Some cool possibly invasive plants.

 

I saw (but couldn't photograph) a ground skink, and there are signs for diamondback rattlers, which we luckily saw none of. Although it'd be kinda cool just to catch a glimpse of one from a very safe distance. Lastly and possibly coolest, we found not one but three small sharks (probably dogfish) washed up on Nanny Goat.

 

Took a swim afterwards and am now chilling at the institute. The swim was somewhat unremarkable but did have a curious encounter. One of the other undergrads picked up a hermit and he responded by promptly unseating himself from his shell. Very weird! We managed to coax him back in by filling up the palm of my hand with water, because apparently he was too over-encumbered in dry air to maneuver himself and the shell into position. If you've never seen a hermit unseated from his shell, it's a really weird lesson in their morphology. Seriously cool stuff. I unfortunately got no pictures of that process.

So here is another shark.

Unfortunately, it's back to work breaking down the enclosures tomorrow, which means more working with flashing (as mentioned last post). Arg. I have some tiny, very thin cuts on my arm from that stuff. It's really a pain, but I'll enjoy a chance to get back out into the marshes, at least. I like feeling helpful to the lab group, too.

By the by, high res pictures of just about everything I post here are also available on my Flickr, I just like to break my narrative up with eye candy.

Crab Wrangling

Today was likely the chillest day I've had on the island so far. Literally all we did was wander out into the marsh and think more, make some more observations, and get a lesson on proper crab handling; the afternoon was a minor bit of cleanup for a past experiment followed by massive chill time with movies and Nanny Goat Beach (yes, that's the real name).

Because I have no pictures of the actual wrangling or work or movies, gonna just toss up some unrelated Nanny Goat shots.

But back to wrangling. This is by far the most bizarrely entertaining aspect of the marshes. Essentially, you find a burrow that looks like it'd house a mud crab and shove a PVC pipe into the marsh beside the burrow. This usually causes some of the water in the burrow to surge out and usually spooks the crab out in the process. Then, you quickly swipe the crab away from the burrow to prevent escape, and then one of two things happens.

The crab comes quietly, or you have to deal with an angry devil of a crab with both claws skyward, at you. Picking the crab itself up requires dodging claws and either grabbing them by the outside of their claws, holding them inward to immobilize the bugger, or grabbing them directly by the arms themselves. Either result is challenging. I had a white claw grab me full on by my fingernail (along it, not on the edge) today and pinch hard. I wish I had pictures of this process. The end result is an immobile crab that can then be measured (although this requires tricky maneuvering), examined to determine gender, or used for experiments. Or all three.

It is a rewarding process, though, and quite fun.

As I said earlier, though, the afternoon was mostly just the tiniest bit of mess cleanup from a past experiment. Being a field experiment, though, breaking it down means contending with mud, and flashing, a commonly used material for cages that's basically aluminum sheets used to box things in, is the worst thing ever to work with. The edges are extremely sharp, and lugging it across the marsh is taxing. Still managed to get a bit done, though.

Nanny Goat was a nice break in the evening. We got there just in time for sunset (which unfortunately wasn't out over the ocean, this being the Atlantic and facing east and whatnot) but was still really cool and chill. There was a storm coming in over the mainland that was booming in the distance, and the moon was stunning. This island is a truly beautiful place. I'm really digging the camaraderie too - my roommates and postdoc adviser have proven invaluable at both bouncing research ideas off and just generally goofing off with. The latter half of that has been awesome because I think I may be closing in on a plausible, cool research project, to be detailed in a later post. 

It's been great so far, though, and it's a fun group to be a part of. And it's only day 3. Crazy!